Chili spinach with balsamic vinegar and honey

Baby spinach is sautéed with sweet onion and chilies then tossed over high heat with balsamic vinegar and honey. It’s a deliciously flavored dish but, by itself, it doesn’t elicit a lot of excitement. Neither does it invoke a sense of anticipation. In vegetarian cooking, that can spell disaster. The key to a delicious vegetarian meal is to layer the textures, flavors and colors. No one told me that. That’s the conclusion I have drawn after almost three years of observing my vegetarian daughter, Sam, and how her appetite responds to the meatless dishes that I cook for her.

What does that mean — layer the textures, flavors and colors? The “colors” part is obvious and probably the easiest of all. The eyes “eat” before the mouth does, as they say, and an attractive dish does affect the appetite. Vegetables are more colorful than meat and one only has to make sure that a vegetarian dish does not exhibit a monotonous monochrome.

“Flavors” is the next easiest component. Instead of a dish that is exclusively or dominantly salty, for example, the taste buds are tickled more effectively by a myriad of flavors. Vietnamese food comes to mind with its refreshing blend of salty, sweet, sour and spicy.

“Texture” is the most challenging part. While it is easy enough to create multiple textures with a piece of meat (fried chicken, for instance, that is crisp outside but moist inside), cooking techniques that work for meat do not always work with vegetables which cannot withstand prolonged exposure to the heat. What I do is add extra ingredients to add texture. In this recipe, the extra ingredients are the egg and the toasted nuts.